| This dissertation examines four art CD-ROMs produced between 1997 and 2000: Zoe Beloff's Beyond, Adriene Jenik's Mauve Desert. A CD-ROM Translation, Simon Biggs's The Great Wall of China, and Jean-Louis Boissier's Moments de Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Foregrounding intermedia adaptation between visual and textual, analog and digital media, these CD-ROMs re-envision literary texts by writers as diverse as Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Raymond Roussel, Nicole Brossard, Franz Kafka, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In its discussion of these digital artworks, this study proposes new concepts and theoretical frameworks for rethinking central issues in digital arts, film studies, and comparative cultural studies. One of these issues concerns corporeal performance in the CD-ROM environment; another explores the interactor's reception strategies---reading, viewing, hearing, and feeling---in the digital media ecology.; These digital adaptations and performances are analyzed in the context of a media ecological perspective that takes issue with teleological accounts of digital media. Departing from neo-formalist assessments of digital media and arts that focus on technological progress and innovation, I emphasize the manner in which the CD-ROM partakes of an (inter)media genealogy that favours recuperation, hybridization, repetition, and emulation processes over supposed technological advancements. The art CD-ROMs I examine do not wish to transcend or replace the cinematic imaginary; evolving in an uncanny, subversive temporal loop, they rather seem intent on reformulating the history of visual culture and performance.; This dissertation, while paying attention to the materiality of the CD-ROM, lays more stress on the centrality of cultural issues such as embodiment, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and subjectivity and argues that the study of the digital media ecology should center around the survival and reconceptualization of visual forms and cultural discourses. The four chapters offer close readings of the visual and discursive constituents of the CD-ROMs in which historical, linguistic, and cultural narratives such as the history of female mediumship, post-feminist translation theory, the Orientalist discourse in Europe, and the archiving of eighteenth-century visual culture come back to life in digitized form. As one of the first sustained studies of art CD-ROMs, this dissertation proposes new concepts for grounding further analyses of the emergent genre of digital adaptation.; Keywords: film adaptation - digital arts - multimedia - digital cinema. |
